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Counterspin – January 11, 2008

Peter Hart on 2008 primaries, Kali Akuno on New Orleans public housing.

This week on CounterSpin: Expecting the pundits, political reporters and pollsters to learn from their mistakes may be a bad bet considering their performance in covering the recent Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. But the bad coverage didn’t end at bad predictions about who would win and lose and which candidates would be forced to leave the race. We’ll be joined by CounterSpin’s own Peter Hart for a discussion of the election coverage so far.

Also on the show: Remember how Hurricane Katrina was going to force elites in this country to acknowledge decades of neglect, mistreatment and racism impacting the urban poor? It’s not too much to say that corporate media have largely backtracked from stated commitments to examine these problems in a sustained, critical way. And in the latest debate, around the destruction of public housing in New Orleans, we’ve got some outlets playing a pretty old tune: suggesting that protestors are misguided, and ought to trust officials who have poor folks’ best interests at heart. We’ll get a different take from Kali Akuno, of the Coalition to Stop the Demolitions and the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund.